Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Tuesday, February 10, 2015

A New Documentary About the Valley of the Silly Con

Marije Meerman's "Cybertopia: Dreams of Silicon Valley" is an excellent documentary portrait of the faith-based libertopian ideology of the exceptionally wealthy and influential and at once dangerously delusive and destructive venture-capitalist "tech" culture. The piece is not doing ideologiekritik, but it exposes the conjoined stupidity and sociopathy of libertechbrotarianism simply by allowing a set of connections to announce themselves on the lips of the Valley's "Thought Leaders" themselves. So many of the Usual Suspects are here -- Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Tim Draper, Stewart Brand... just click on my Superlative Summary (an archive of over a decade of anti-futurological writings) and scroll down to the names of figure after figure featured in the piece to discover the interconnections of these folks to robocalypse daydreams, techno-immortalist wish-fulfilment fantasizing, techno-fix climate denialism, cyberangel uploading to Holodeck Heaven, the whole Robot Cult nine yards. The piece doesn't excoriate these tendencies as I do so incessantly myself, but by revealing how inextricably linked certain guiding "tech" notions, attitudes, and efforts turn out to be that might otherwise seem completely separate or only incidentally or accidentally connected, the documentary well prepares the ground for those of us who would move from observation to critique of these plutocratic actors, reactionary ideological formations, and explicitly organized programs. At the very least the documentary is proof of the abiding force of Richard Barbrook's and Andy Cameron's canonical critique The Californian Ideology. The fraudulent foolishness of bitcoin, separatist seasteading, sooper-AI, six Californias, burning man as world-scalable utopia, tragic gizmofashionistas blissed out in mom-jeans on the dancefloor are not merely dismissed as ridiculous (tho' of course ridiculous they are), but understood in the piece as symptoms of underlying assumptions and aspirations. I was especially intrigued to witness throughout the documentary the way free associational expression functioned to render the discourse anti-critical, the way its insistence of competitiveness plays out in denials and disavowals of historical complexity, the way the privilege of advocates enables an obliviousness or even hostility to democratic processes and commitments. I couldn't help but notice the way the incessant conjuration of "imagination" depended here on the denial of human precarity, how the aspiration toward "utopia" was premised on denials of human finitude, how visions of "heroism" demanded the denial of historical struggles and specificities. Once again, we witness in this devastating short film a group of self-styled "Smartest Guys in the Room" (white techbros on parade, natch) who build their genius out of ignorance, insensitivity, and brutality. Watch the film and by all means do say what you think about it in the Moot:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/11/science/panel-urges-more-research-on-geoengineering-as-a-tool-against-climate-change.html?ref=science------------Panel Urges Research on Geoengineering as a Tool Against Climate ChangeBy HENRY FOUNTAIN

The National Academy of Sciences panel said that with proper governance,experiments of climate intervention technologies should pose nosignificant risk. . .====